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Appellate Review of Judicial Fact-Finding Processes and Decisions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
At first glance, appellate control of judicial fact-finding appears to be a precise and nicely circumscribed topic. This impression is grossly deceiving. To begin with, in a comparative context, it is inevitable to hint at the underlying structural features of the German criminal procedure, since appellate control is not a free-floating self-explanatory element of the criminal justice system, but built upon a particular procedural structure. Secondly, the control of fact-finding by the appeal court forms only a small and perhaps even the least important phase of the fact-finding process. Therefore it needs to be located within the larger perspective of the procedural fact-finding process as a whole. Thirdly, it goes without saying that the control process by way of appellate review is largely shaped by the different legal instruments of control. Knowledge of their operation and legal scope with particular emphasis on the fact-finding process cannot be taken for granted, even given an all-German audience.
Fourthly, the appellate control of judicial fact-finding cannot be understood by way of abstract description only: such a description needs to be underpinned by examples. This puts me in a predicament, since the pertinent standards developed by the appellate control amount to no less than an aggregate of the German law of evidence. Hence I have to restrict myself to a few paradigmatic examples hoping that they will reveal the structural pattern if there is one.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1997
Footnotes
*
Professor of Law, University of the Saarland, Saarbrücken.
References
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